John Vaughan, 70, is a senior teaching fellow at Leeds Business School and a business manager, living in West Yorkshire.
When I read about Dr Meredith Belbin in 1999, he was little more than the subject of an intriguing newspaper article. I am now fortunate enough to call him a friend.
I remember opening the Guardian and seeing the headline: “Play the corporate game but stay true to yourself.” The article explained in detail a theory developed by Belbin, a British researcher and management theorist, who explained that teams work best when there are four or five people behaving in different ways.
The way for a graduate to fit into this structure, said Belbin, is to “know enough about themselves in terms of what they’re good at and not so good at. Admitting what you are not good at creates a role for someone else. It produces a need, and people respond to needs.” As someone who taught and wrote about business, I had a professional interest in styles and methods of corporate management, and I read on.
I remember being completely struck by how much sense Belbin’s theory made. I just thought: “This is it! This is exactly what I need. At long last, somebody understands me and has brilliantly articulated what I’ve thought for ages!”
Belbin’s theory is now a worldwide phenomenon, but 18 years ago it was a total revelation to me. Simply put, the theory states that there are nine different “types” of people, and if you have too many people of the same type in one group, your business will fail. The recipe for success includes “people persons”, “thinking persons” and “action persons”.
In other words, it makes the job fit the person and play to the individual’s strengths; there’s a big difference between putting together a group of workers and creating a team. Moreover, Belbin suggested that companies often seek to recruit the “perfect” employee, but explained that this could lead to teams of star performers who, when asked to work together, might go awry.
At the time, I was working on the MBA programme at Leeds Business School, teaching students from all over the world. I realised they could learn as much from each other as they could from me, because the diversity of the group lent itself well to Belbin’s model.
In the 18 years since, the theory has been taken by Leeds graduates and shared all over the world. Experts have built on it, specialists have added their own expertise to the theory, and it has been translated into different languages. I ended up inviting Belbin himself to come and talk to my students. They loved meeting him, and I now count him as a good friend. At his 90th birthday party last year, it was wonderful to meet students from all over the world who are proponents of his work, and admirers of the man himself.
I’m not so much a psychologist – more of an anthropologist, really – but I do find myself trying to work out what types people are when I meet them. It’s been a great journey, and amazing to think that Belbin now has a magazine article that I wrote about team-building hanging on the wall above his desk!
